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18 January 2012

House Fetish

Last fall, when Kelly over at Simply Kelly put together a dining room design for us, she suggested that it might be neat to use some construction photos as wall art. I LOVED that idea, and I've been working on it intermittently since then, sifting through thousands of construction pictures (as I previewed here) and amassing matching frames.

In the end, though, I decided that construction pictures would be better somewhere a little less prominent, so I ended up hanging three pairs of pictures in the hallway just off of the dining room.

But before we get down to the details, let's take a quick ride in the Green House time machine. In our old condo, we had a big hallway that we called "the gallery" because we hung a bunch of art (primarily consisting of framed Kandinsky, Picasso, and Duchamp posters):

(It's also where we hung delicates to dry -- I really miss having that long half-wall....) Of the three big "paintings" in the hall, I think my favorite is Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, which we hung over the staircase. (Too literal?) Now that we don't have stairs, I'm still looking for a good spot for it.

Anyway, even though our house is twice as big as our old condo, there's actually less wall space, so even this little hallway is precious wall real estate:

It was great to be able to put these narrow strips of wall to use:

(Yeah, I started this project before putting away the Christmas decorations. Don't judge.)

And here's the hall, all dressed up:

This is the view from the dining area -- still visible, but without screaming "our house is a shrine to...our house!":

One note -- a review I read on the Target website noted that these frames are a pain to hang because of their hangers:

And it's true -- it took a total of six nail holes to get the first two frames to hang relatively straight...but I blame myself for not figuring out that I should have just bought some picture wire to make them into normal one-nail frames, which I did after those first two frames:

Once that light bulb went off, hanging the third through sixth frames went a lot more smoothly. And we love seeing the construction pictures as much as we love finally having one more area decorated -- even if it's just a 30-square-foot hallway.